In my most recent weekly Forbes column, “Common Sense About Kids, Facebook & The Net,” I consider the wisdom of an online petition that the child safety advocacy group Common Sense Media is pushing, which demands that Facebook give up any thought of letting kids under the age of 13 on the site. “There is absolutely no proof of any meaningful social or educational value of Facebook for children under 13,” their petition insists. “Indeed, there are very legitimate concerns about privacy, as well as its impact on children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development.” Common Sense Media doesn’t offer any evidence to substantiate those claims, but one can sympathize with some of the general worries. Nonetheless, as I argue in my essay:
Common Sense Media’s approach to the issue is short-sighted. Calling for a zero-tolerance, prohibitionist policy toward kids on Facebook (and interactive media more generally) is tantamount to a bury-your-head-in-sand approach to child safety. Again, younger kids are increasingly online, often because their parents allow or even encourage it. To make sure they get online safely and remain safe, we’ll need a different approach than Common Sense Media’s unworkable “just-say-no” model.
Think about it this way: Would it make sense to start a petition demanding that kids be kept out of town squares, public parks, or shopping malls? Most of us would find the suggestion ludicrous. Continue reading →
[Fellow members of the Society for the Prevention of Vice, I urge you to take immediate action to continue our crusade to clean up America’s media marketplace by ridding it of the scourge of media hyper-violence. A clip has come to our attention that merits particular concern and I hope you will agree something must be done by our government before such filth gets widespread dissemination. So, please join me in signing this petition to the FCC to take action now—for the children—before such unspeakable acts of violence are mimicked by millions of youth across America.]
TO: Julius Genachowski, Chairman, Federal Communications Commission
FROM: Adam Thierer, President, Society for the Prevention of Vice (formerly known as the Society for Soft Pillow Fights)
RE: Another example of unspeakable media violence that must be stopped
Dear Chairman Genachowski:
A video has come to our attention that displays, once again, the media industry’s utter disregard for human decency and the dignity of life, and we hope you will agree something must be done to stop its dissemination before it is too late. In this video:
- A man’s nose is seemingly twisted off his face (as he screams in agony) and then his face is forced onto a grinding machine while sparks fly off his burning flesh (he again screams in agony);
- A shoe with an extended spike is inserted into a man’s head and then his eyeball and then his ear lobe (he screams in agony each time);
- The man who was impaled with said shoe spike then bites the offender’s foot (he, too, screams in agony);
- A blow-torch is used to light a man’s buttocks afire (he screams in agony);
- A man climbs a pole, plays with live electrical wires, is then is electrocuted after chewing on said wires, and then falls to the ground still shaking from the voltage running through his body (he screams in agony);
- A wrench is dropped on a man’s head (he screams in agony) and he then uses said wrench to hit another man over the head and violently twist his nose with it (he screams in agony); and
- Finally, the electrocuted man has a light bulb inserted into one ear and a screwdriver into the other (he screams in agony and then, bizarrely, he laughs to end the clip — as if he is mocking the depravity of what we have just witnessed!)
I have attached a clip of this unspeakably evil carnival of pain, but I warn you that it could forever darken your soul. Can you imagine, sir, if earlier generations of American youth had seen this? Could America have produced “The Greatest Generation” if the youth of the World War II era had grown up watching such filth? We now know from several psychological studies that children will mimic whatever they see on the screen. If they see such depictions of violence in media, they will reenact it themselves in the real world. In other words, “monkey see-monkey do.” Please, on behalf of all those signing this petition, and for the sake of our children, I beg you to help us put a stop to this moral outrage before our great civilization decays and withers away in a sea of media hyper-violence such as this: Continue reading →
Before commenting on Lawrence Lessig’s latest call to abolish the Federal Communications Commission (he issued a similar call for the FCC’s abolition earlier this year, which I commented on here), let’s recall what Tim Lee posted yesterday about “Real Regulators“:
Too many advocates of regulation seem to have never considered the possibility that the FCC bureaucrats in charge of making these decisions at any point in time might be lazy, incompetent, technically confused, or biased in favor of industry incumbents. That’s often what “real regulators” are like, and it’s important that when policy makers are crafting regulatory scheme, they assume that some of the people administering the law will have these kinds of flaws, rather than imagining that the rules they write will be applied by infallible philosopher-kings.
Ironically, Prof. Lessig — who typically defends many forms of high-tech regulation like Net neutrality and online content labeling — is essentially agreeing with Tim’s critique of bureaucracy. But Lessig seems to ignore the underlying logic of Tim’s critique and instead imagines that we need only reinvent bureaucracy in order to save it. But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, let’s hear what Lessig proposes.
In a
Newsweek column this week entitled “Reboot the FCC,” Lessig argues that the FCC is beyond saving because, instead of protecting innovation, the agency has succumb to an “almost irresistible urge to protect the most powerful instead.” Consequently, he continues:
The solution here is not tinkering. You can’t fix DNA. You have to bury it. President Obama should get Congress to shut down the FCC and similar vestigial regulators, which put stability and special interests above the public good. In their place, Congress should create something we could call the Innovation Environment Protection Agency (iEPA), charged with a simple founding mission: “minimal intervention to maximize innovation.” The iEPA’s core purpose would be to protect innovation from its two historical enemies–excessive government favors, and excessive private monopoly power.
As was the case with his earlier call to “blow up the FCC,” I am tickled to hear Lessig call for shutting down an agency that many of us have been fighting against for the last few decades. (Here’s a 1995 blueprint for abolishing the FCC that I contributed to, and here’s PFF’s recent “DACA” project to comprehensively reform and downsize the agency.)
But is Lessig really calling for the same sort of sweeping regulatory reform and downsizing that others have been calling for? And has he identified the real source of the problem that he hopes to correct? I don’t think so. There are 3 basic problems with the argument Lessig is putting forward in his essay. I will address each in turn.
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.